Category Archives: virtual worlds

OHSU psychiatrist to highlight warning signs for school shootings

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Some teens are having troubling distinguishing between real and virtual realities, making them more likely to turn on the public with real guns blazing.

That’s what Oregon Health and Sciences University psychiatrist Jerald Block was scheduled to tell a conference in Washington earlier today. He cites the Columbine shooting case as an example of what is yet to come.

The Columbine shooters, Harris and Klebold, Block say, were addicted to first person shooters (video games). The two took their aggressions into RL (real life) after having the plug pulled on their digital worlds.

OHSU psychiatrist to highlight warning signs for school shootings
“Virtual realities, like the ones that Harris and Klebold experienced, are a double-edged sword,” explained Block, a clinical faculty member in the OHSU Department of Psychiatry. “On one hand, virtual worlds allow people to feel connected and empowered. They also allow participants to escape stress and have an outlet for aggression. On the other hand, when a heavy user must eliminate or cut back on the virtual, as was the case with these two killers at times, the user can feel lonely, anxious, or angry.

SL + 3D – hardware = total inworld immersion (TIA)

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Linden Lab chairman Mitch Kapor and developer Philippe Bossut today demonstrated a camera-based motion recog system that controls your avatar’s movements in Second Life. Looks good on the video, below…

With a 3D viewing headset (such as the augmented reality headset imagined here), you would have your own at-home 3DVR “cave” for exploring the metaverse.

Incredibly, we are just years, perhaps only months, away from very discreet (i.e., they won’t take over your livingroom), immersive experiences, at home.

And it will cost a fraction of what 3DVR caves, such as the one at Brown University (an elaborate mix of multiple projectors, hand and head tracking devices, and a stack of Linux servers).

Of course, the more seamless metaversal interfaces become, the more likely people will start forgetting where they really are.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2t52gkAwJq8&eurl=http://secondlife.reuters.com/stories/2008/04/11/mitch-kapor-unveils-sl-navigation-via-3d-camera/]

[digg=http://digg.com/hardware/SL_3D_hardware_near_complete_immersion]

Second Life bubble bursts

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Virtual land values plummet more than 40 percent, to $1,000 even.

(Would you buy land from this leprechaun? Image: Markbaard Meredith)

In Second Life, there’s a sucker born every minute (give or take). Some virtual land barons, for example, are finding out that what they’ve got ain’t worth much–since the supply of their product took another step toward “unlimited.”

To-date, some landowners have gotten rich selling parcels at similarly inflated prices.

But hoping to reboot waning interest in its virtual world, Linden Lab this month will make more islands available, at a fraction of what users have been paying lately for the make believe property.

Of course, land is limitless when it exists only on a server somewhere. And there are going to be more than one virtual world to visit and park it in the near future. But you knew that already.

Reuters/Second Life » Linden to increase land supply, drop prices
Linden Lab announced on its blog yesterday it would be increasing the land supply in Second Life for the second quarter of 2008.

Linden has seen average prices for land drift from about L$6.3 per meter in Q1 to around L$11.5 per meter currently. Strong demand for virtual land — essentially dedicated CPU time on Linden Lab’s servers — is a bright spot for Second Life’s in-world economy amidst flagging overall growth.

Second Life | The Second Life® Brand Center

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Ding!

I’d read that Second Life developer Linden Lab was prohibiting the press from using its logos, and thought that was ridiculous.

Behold:

Second Life | The Second Life® Brand Center
Guidelines for Press Use of the Second Life Hand Logo

(These are excerpts–mb)

Never use a Second Life Hand Logo (or any part or version of one):

in any name or logo of a business, news program, or publication, including any website or blog, in a header or banner of a website or blog (so far so good, right?–mb) in the title of … without……in any manner…

in any manner that tarnishes the Second Life brand name or the Logo. (My emphasis–mb)

In other words, you may not publish this logo (below), and say it looks evil.

Little RASCALS stir up Second Life

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(Caution: Four-year-old Eddie might just tear your heart out. That’s because he’s built on an AI framework for the military. Images: RPI)

Cognitive scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute claim to have created a Second Life avatar with the reasoning skills of a four-year-old child.

The artificial child, “Eddie,” runs on an RPI supercomputer, and comes from a lab funded by the U.S. Department of Defense.

Selmer Bringsjord, leader of the RPI research team that created “Eddie,” says applications for the tyke might include “homeland defense.”

That’s because Eddie also goes by the name, “Edd.”

And Edd (below) is a baddass homeland security robot who looks like the villainous machine in the film, Robocop. Both Eddie and Edd are based on the Rensselaer Advanced Synthetic Architecture for “Living” Systems, or RASCALS, an artificial life form platform created for military and intelligence operations.

Eddie’s supercomputing descendants will be much more capable of mimicking humans than he is.

“Truly convincing autonomous synthetic characters must possess memories; believe things, want things, remember things.” – Bringsjord

The Pentagon and Homeland Security would then be free to use synthetic characters as spies inworld, for example. There they will able to operate undetected, and unhindered by the pangs of a truly human conscience.

Bringing Second Life To Life: Researchers Create Character With Reasoning Abilities of a Child

Troy, N.Y. – Today’s video games and online virtual worlds give users the freedom to create characters in the digital domain that look and seem more human than ever before. But despite having your hair, your height, and your hazel eyes, your avatar is still little more than just a pretty face.

John Craig Freeman inworld, and at Park Street Station

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Emerson prof. and Second Life artist John Craig Freeman appears in this video to be working on a way for a Second Life avatar to poke around Boston.
In a recent blog post, Freeman said he hopes to develop an open source virtual world.
clipped from johncraigfreeman.wordpress.com

What's wrong with this story?

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“Second Life” employee enjoys second life as a reporter; reads like a psyop

snapshot_002.jpg I’ve been trying to enjoy Second Life this week, as Markbaard Meredith. (That’s me visiting the Star Trek museum.)

Bt first: I am mystified that this is what passes for an embedded journalist in SL:

W. James Au
From April 2003 to February 2006, I was a contract writer for Linden Lab, creators of Second Life, primarily hired by the company to cover SL as an embedded journalist in an emerging society– its controversies, its personalities, its innovations and ambitions, along with larger themes of identity, social norms and organization, and cultural expression important to online worlds in general.

That contractual relationship has ended, but the story continues here.

That means Au was a paid marketing person for Linden Lab for almost three years. Yet he has kept his title seamlessly through his rebirth as a journalist.

Au continues to publish a positive overall message about the brave new world he helped to build.

Au (below) appears to have to have we-make-money-not-art charmed.

A blogger quotes Au: “SL is an international cutting edge creative space with high barriers to entry.”

In other words, the message is: Second Life is where the cool people hang out. Anyone who has explored SL knows this is preposterous, although there are excellent artists like John Craig Freeman working inworld.

But Au’s challenge, and invitation, should make more inworlders out of us.